By Jim Saunders ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge this week set the stage for a trial in a battle over the state House’s attempt to obtain internal information about how the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics developed standards of care for children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor rejected summary-judgment motions from both sides and said he will hold a trial in the lawsuit, which the pediatricians group filed last year after House Health & Human Services Chairman Randy Fine, R-Brevard County, subpoenaed documents.
The group has argued that forced disclosure of information would violate First Amendment rights. Winsor’s order on the summary-judgment motions said the group turned over documents to the House but redacted the names of 15 people connected with specific statements.
The order, issued Monday, said the “sole remaining issue is whether the First Amendment precludes the House (Health & Human Services) Committee from insisting on production of unredacted documents” showing the 15 names. But Winsor said the issues could not be resolved in a summary judgment before a full trial.
“For example, the subpoena mostly seeks only documents that relate to FCAAP’s (the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics’) development, endorsement, and recommendation of the standards of care for gender dysphoria in children and adolescents,” Winsor wrote. “Thus, it stands to reason that the names to be disclosed are limited in scope and tied to the House committee’s stated interest. But neither party identified all the contested documents or redactions, and there is at least some reason to question whether all the redacted names are substantially related to the House committee’s interest.”
The House issued the subpoena near the end of the 2023 legislative session, which included the Republican-controlled Legislature passing a measure aimed at preventing transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria.
Many major medical organizations support such treatments for gender dysphoria, which the federal government defines clinically “as “significant distress that a person may feel when sex or gender assigned at birth is not the same as their identity.” But Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans — including Fine — have assailed such treatments and disputed that they are medically appropriate.
Winsor last year rejected a preliminary injunction that the pediatricians group sought to block the subpoena. But that didn’t resolve the underlying lawsuit.
In a summary-judgment motion filed in January, House attorneys said Fine’s committee should receive the information as part of its oversight role.
“In sum, the House committee has an overriding interest in investigating whether the integrity of the process by which practitioner-developed standards of care are created and promoted has been compromised,” the motion said. “If medical organizations in Florida are endorsing and promoting novel and seemingly harmful medical interventions as a ‘consensus’ standard of care, the House committee has authority to investigate how that purported consensus was formed and whether such organizations actually speak for their physician membership rather than just their president when they purport to endorse such practices.”
But in a response filed in February, Barry Richard, an attorney for the pediatricians group, wrote that the organization “doesn’t seek to protect its members’ anonymity in connection with their relationship to the association and doesn’t claim that membership in the organization alone creates a reasonable fear of injury. Rather, FCAAP seeks to maintain anonymity of particular groups of members in connection with their interchange of ideas on a controversial subject, and it is this anonymity the committee subpoena seeks to destroy.”
“The committee’s broad statements regarding its right to legislate in the field of medicine and its general investigative authority are insufficient to overcome the fundamental rights to anonymous speech and association guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Richard, who is married to Rep. Allison Tant, D-Tallahassee, wrote. “The committee has not even attempted to explain why it needs to know which of the persons whose names were redacted made which of the unredacted statements or the relationship between even one of the redacted names and the committee’s ability to perform its legislative function.”
Winsor did not immediately set a trial date.
